Post #150 December 24 2018

“Year End Summary”

On this Christmas Eve, it’s fitting to take a summary look at the writing year for me.  Here are some statistics:

Total downloads this year (all titles) = 5228

Total downloads since starting with Smashwords (2014) = 18,189

As of this writing (12-17-18), my newest sf novel The Farpool: Union has earned 98 downloads (it was uploaded) the day before Thanksgiving.

Other novels put up this year and their total downloads are as follows:

The Farpool: Convergence = 340

The Specter = 279

The Farpool: Exodus = 545

The Farpool: Marauders of Seome = 615

That’s the basic summary of my writing life this year. 

Which leads me to what’s coming next.  In a word, my new series Time Jumpers.  I’ve posted about this before, so I thought I’d end the year with an excerpt from Episode 2.  Time Jumpers is a serial story in 12 episodes.  The first episode is uploaded on February 1.  I currently have two episodes in the bank, and will start on Episode 3 on 2 January 2019.

Herewith, an excerpt from Episode 2:

 

Ten hours later, a warning chime awakened Dringoth from a dreamless sleep in his stateroom.  It was a message from Libra.

“URME, put it through.”  Dringoth winced as he banged his head on a stanchion above the bunk.  Surat’s mustachioed face appeared in a small puff of display over the bunk.

“Just thought you’d like to know, Captain Dringoth.  Libra won our bet.  We just punched through the bottom of the ice layer and we’re in some kind of dense shale layer ourselves now.  Probably the same thing you got stuck in.  Libra now on course and underway to the target.”

Dringoth started to reply, but an insistent beep interrupted.  Golich’s voice came over the 1MC.  The TT1 was up on the command deck, monitoring Felix’s progress.

“Fathometer sounding…it’s programmed to go off when rock density drops below a certain threshold.”  Golich manipulated a small dial, then his fingers flew over a keyboard.  “I’m cutting back the borer to half power…and dropping our track speed.  Looking at the plot…density’s dropping fast.  Some kind of void must be just ahead.”

Dringoth got dressed and made his way up the gangway to A deck.

The hum which had pervaded Felix for most of the past day now slackened to a muted vibration.  Just as Golich dropped speed a little more, a shuddering lurch rattled through the ship’s hull and high-pitched scraping and squealing could be heard just outside. 

“Going to forward vid, sir—“ Golich announced.  The screen went from dark to crazy bouncing and careening, speckled with lights, then the luminescent globe of the borer lens materialized into view.  Beyond the glare of the borer head, a deep black swelled into view.

“The Hollows—“Dringoth said quietly.  “There it is.”

“Dead ahead…dropping tracks to one quarter.  I’m shutting the borer down for now.  Looks like we’ve bored right into some kind of void.”

Just then, they all felt the ship go weightless for a moment, as Felix dropped through the void and smashed into a rock formation below.  The ship shuddered and creaked as she settled against the face of the rock.

The air was still for long moments.

Dringoth shook the dust off, wincing at some kind of laceration on his left shoulder.  “Everyone all right?  Crew, report back now.”

One after another, they all called in: Golich, M’Bela, Acth:On’e, Yang and URME.

Dringoth checked the sounder, then the profiler.  “Where the hell are we?”

Golich took a peek out the side porthole, then stabbed a button on his console.  Strong floodlights from Felix’s forward hull illuminated the void around them.

“Looks like we’re in some kind of narrow cavern.  You know Gibbons is full of these places…caves, tunnels, mazes, ancient lava tubes.  We must have bored right into one.”

M’Bela had been checking the cat’s hull.  “Hull still intact, sir.  Pressure down a bit, but within the safe zone.  No further breaches that I can detect.  Our repairs seemed to have held.”

“Great.  What about—”

But Dringoth’s words were interrupted by M’Bela from the Search and Surveillance console aft of them.  “Captain, deco wakes strong and close aboard…readings converging on bearing oh eight five…off to our starboard.”

“Find out what Libra’s seeing.”

A few minutes’ parley between the cats determined that Libra had punched into the same void/cavern, some three hundred meters away, but she hadn’t been damaged in the fall.  Comparing readings and sensor indications, both Temporal Sensor specialists concurred: whatever it was, the source of GIDECO was nearby, possibly in the same cavern.

Dringoth thought for a moment.  “If we start up again, we may just collapse this void on top of both of us.  I think the cats can handle it but I’d rather not try it.”

URME pointed out, “Sir, studying Queenie’s profiler readings seems to indicate our target may well be inside this same cavern, perhaps at a lower elevation.  Perhaps, we could egress in hypersuits and recon on foot?”

Dringoth thought that a good idea.  “I like it.  Okay, let Libra know what we’re doing.  Queenie, you and Yang are with me.  We’re taking a little hike.  Golich, Acth:On’e and URME will stay with the cat for now.  Let’s go.”

Suit-up and egress through Felix’s lockout took an hour.  Advised of their intentions, Surat agreed that Libra would join the search party.  Half an hour later, a platoon of time jumpers clad in armored hypersuits assembled on a sloping shelf of rock between the two cats.

Surat pointed in the direction of their target.  The cavern was black as night on that heading, and footing was treacherous with ice and loose sand or gravel.

Libra’s commander noted the slope.  “Ground drops away pretty sharply up ahead, Dringoth.  Maybe we ought to use suit boost.  My TS tech says GIDECO’s that way, somewhere down below us.” 

“Let’s get as detailed a sounding as we can before we go anywhere,” Dringoth suggested.

Acoustic pulses produced a rough outline of what lay ahead and below them.  The void was shaped like a bent teardrop, curving down at an ever-increasing slope for hundreds of meters below their elevation.

Whatever the Gibbons Decoherence Object was, it was down there.

“Okay,” Dringoth commanded, “Felix crew, light off.  And keep your helmet lamps on low.  I don’t want too much glare as we go down.”

Libra’s team did the same and, one after another, the small party of hypersuit-clad time jumpers fired off their suit boosters.  Compressed nitrogen gas thrusters along their suit legs lifted each of them a meter above the ground and they descended into the dark chasm slowly, carefully dropping down what seemed to become a near-vertical shaft of rock.

Surat’s sensor tech called out the approach.  “Deco wake signal growing stronger.  Advise adjusting course three degrees to port….”

The search party shifted left and descended further on boost deeper into the opaque depths of the void.

Yang’s sounder beeped in her helmet earphones.  “Pinging ground coming up…seventy meters below us.”

“Signal still growing stronger,” the Libra tech added. 

It was Yang who figured out what the crazy profiler outlines on her instruments were telling her.  “Point source directly below us…some kind of object.  Approximately twenty-five meters main dimension, some kind of added echoes from the edges.”

Carefully, one by one, the search party alighted on pebbly ground, slick with ice.  It was M’Bela who shone her helmet lamps on the object first.

There were audible gasps around the comm circuit.

“What the hell--?”

“My God, what is that?”

“It’s a—”

“Some kind of ship, maybe?”

The ship…the object…looked like a giant Christmas tree ornament, lying on its side.  Conical projections extended into shadows fore and aft, on either end of the bulbous, mostly spherical mid-section.  A thick patina of dust caked the entire structure; clearly, the thing had lain there for a very long time.

“Clearly a ship of some kind,” Surat decided.  He motioned his sensor tech forward.  “Can you get a reading on the hull…looks like it was breached along the equator.”

Libra’s sensor tech was Nuwen Kharg.  Kharg eased forward through ankle deep dust, slipping on the ice and probed the object with his sounder.  “Sir, my read shows no clear differentiation on the material, but it’s showing isotopic dating that can’t be right…something like two point five million years…hundreds of thousands of decaterrs.  Could be instrument failure…let me run a diagnostic.”

“Your instrument may be right after all,” Dringoth said.  Cautiously, he pushed by Kharg and went straight up to the hull, experimentally touching the outer plates.  “Surat, didn’t T2 put out some kind of report a few years ago—probably archived now—about the early Coethi encounters?  That they first used actual ships in early time jumping…before the swarm could manage temporal shifts as a swarm.”

“You think this may be an early Coethi jumpship?”  Surat was openly skeptical.  “Time Guard didn’t have a lot of intel behind that supposition, just theories.  Nobody ever saw an actual Coethi ship of any kind.  My guess is such things don’t exist.  T2 fairy tales, if you ask me.”

Something caught Dringoth’s eyes…maybe a reflection.  A glint off something solid inside the hull breach.  Startled, he backed away quickly.  “Queenie, Yang, power up your HERF guns and get up here.  Shine a stronger light inside—”

Surat was more cautious.  “Take it easy, Captain. Give that thing some room…we don’t know what this contraption is.”

As ordered, Yang and M’Bela came forward carefully.  Yang twisted her helmet lamp to put more light inside the breach.  Piles of gear had spilled out of the breach, littering the cavern floor, now nearly buried in dust.   Nobody had any idea what the gear was but it looked old, rusted and shattered, like discarded junk. 

“Right there,” Dringoth said.  “That direction.”

Yang shone her light.  The shadows parted and for a second, it was clear what had caught Dringoth’s eye.

“It’s a body,” Yang muttered.  She shivered in spite of herself.  “In a suit—”

Dringoth climbed partway through the breach, perched precariously on a piece of the gear, which wobbled under his boot.  He steadied himself by holding onto the edge of the hull breach.

“It is indeed.  And it looks…”  He swallowed hard.  “It seems to be human...or was.”

 

So that’s the excerpt.  The Word Shed will take a two-week sabbatical for the holidays.  The next post comes on January 7, 2019.  In this post, I’ll provide a little background on what comes after Time Jumpers.  It’s a novel about two future architects, distantly related to each other but separated in time by 800 years.  They’re both competing with each other to cement their legacies as architects, but the competition raises an existential threat for Humanity.  It’s called Monument.

Have a great holiday.  See you in 2019.

Phil B.

 

Post #149 December 17, 2018

“Have Some Serial for Breakfast Today”

I just finished Episode 2 of my upcoming serial Time Jumpers.  Episode 1 gets uploaded and becomes available to readers on February 1, 2019.  So I’m hoping to be well underway on Episode 3 when the balloon goes up.  I’d like to always have several episodes archived at any one time, since delays, accidents and general life stuff happens every month, which could interfere with my self-imposed schedule.  Here’s the schedule for the series:

Episode #        Title                                                                 Approximate Upload Date

1.             ‘Marooned in Voidtime’                                 February 1, 2019        
2.             ‘Keaton’s World’                                            March 1, 2019
3.             ‘A Small Navigation Error’                             April 15, 2019
4.             ‘Cygnus Rift’                                                  May 3, 2019
5.             ‘The Time Guard’                                           May 31, 2019
6.             ‘First Light Corridor                                       June 28, 2019
7.             ‘Hapsh’m and the First Coethi Encounter’     August 2, 2019
8.             ‘Operation Galactic Hammer’                        August 30, 2019
9.             ‘Byrd’s Draconis’                                           September 27, 2019               
10.             ‘First Jump Squadron’                                    November 1, 2019
11.             ‘Planck Time’                                                  November 29, 2019
12.             ‘The Time Twister’                                          January 3, 2020

 

Why write a serialized story?  I did other posts about this, so let me remind you of some of the reasons why this is a good idea, at this point in my career.

1. Serialized stories engage the reader more quickly and more directly.  The stories come out faster, on a schedule.  Readers can get their “fix” more often.  If they like the stories and the author is doing his job, they can provide quicker feedback and even have an impact on how the overall story proceeds.  It makes the reader feel like part of the story-telling process and helps the writer go where his readers want him to go.  It also helps the writer feel like he’s not writing in a vacuum…that there are readers out there and this is how they feel about the story.
    
   One writer, Jane Friedman in a column at Writer Unboxed, wrote this about serial fiction:
   For purists, a serial is a work that the author writes in progress, releases on a specific schedule or deadline (close to the time when the writing gets done), and is produced without a preconceived middle or ending. Such serials often involve reader engagement and may incorporate reader feedback that helps the author mold the story along the way. Bestselling science-fiction author John Scalzi launched his career on a serial, Old Man’s War, and of course everybody knows and even loves shows like All My Children. The soap opera is classic serial storytelling.
    
2. Serialized stories can help build an audience.  There aren’t a lot of paying markets for serials today, so many writers (such as me) do this for free, as a way of building an audience for related or later work.  In my case, I have 7 novels published through Smashwords.com that are part of a series called Tales of the Quantum Corps.  I have another series of 5 sf novels entitled The Farpool Stories. One of my goals in doing the Time Jumpers serial is to help establish a greater audience for both of these series through a common theme, characters, settings and stories. 
    
3. There are several advantages to writing serials.
    
   Robin Rivera, of writeonsisters.com, had this to say about the advantages:

• You can take every episode in a new direction. Explore opposing viewpoints of the same events. You can kill off characters or rapidly change their character arcs. In fact, the more you shake things up, the better your readers will like it!
• You have the luxury of being able to revisit the same world building and characters as many times as you wish. The story can go on for years, evolving and taking new directions while filling many seasons of serials.
• The pressure to finish the big story arc isn’t hanging over your head the way it is with a novel. A serial writer can go on chasing the same villain forever, as long as the smaller stories are exciting and there are enough clues to the larger plot mission to make the readers want to stick around for the ride.

1. But there are also disadvantages as well.  Robin goes on to say:

·         Slow, atmospheric writers need not apply! The market is competitive for all writing, but the pressure to create a knock-the-reader’s-socks-off opening episode for a series is huge. You must have memorable characters and a setting that feels real from the first installment. Being unforgettable is critical, because the reader needs to feel they can pick up the story after a break without missing a beat.

·         Action is the king of all serial fiction, and only the tightest writing works. The hook needs to come in fast. Each story installment must have some resolution to the current problem while also leaving something unresolved to encourage the reader to read the next installment, namely it needs a cliffhanger.

·         The serial format is not good for a writer challenged by deadlines. One of the most important aspects for building a serial readership is getting the next installment out quickly and when you’ve promised you would. If you establish a plan of releasing once a week or once a month, you need to keep with it until the season is done.

I’ve found both Robin’s experience and Jane’s thoughts to be both true and relevant to my own experience and I’m pretty new to this.  Especially the part about tightly knit writing and lots of action.  I’m thinking the experience of developing, writing and uploading my serial Quantum Troopers (about 8000 downloads so far with this serial alone) on a tight schedule made me a better storyteller.  Here’s hoping….

 

In the next post to The Word Shed, I’ll sum up my year in the world of writing.  This will also be my final post for the year, but not to worry.  The Word Shed will resume early in January 2019.

 

See you on December 24…Christmas Eve.

 

Phil B

 

 

 

Post #148 December 10, 2018

“Man, the Storyteller”

Picture Og and Grog sitting around the campfire one evening after a dinner of mammoth meat and tree roots.  Og is sharpening his spear points.  Grog is skinning a hide.  Og grunts and gestures at Grog: “If you had followed my orders, you wouldn’t have been injured by that mammoth, you stupid dolt.”  After some loud arguing back and forth, and few threats, Slamdok intervenes and, using more gestures and grunts, recounts the events of the day that led to Grog’s injury and tonight’s dinner.  Some modifications are made to the account and after awhile, after everyone is stuffed with enough mammoth meat and some fermented berries that Slamdok’s wife made, everybody agrees that this is what happened.  The day’s hunt goes down in the annals of the tribe as “the way things happened.”

It becomes a legend.  Later, maybe a myth.

Man is preeminently a storytelling animal.  We don’t know if this is how stories began but we do know, from research, that stories have for generations served a profoundly important evolutionary purpose.

I have posted about this before.  Why does our brain love stories so much?  In an article from the Greater Good Science Center (University of California, Berkeley) in December 2013, neurobiologist Paul Zak says this:

The first part of the answer is that as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts.

Think of this as the “car accident effect.” You don’t really want to see injured people, but you just have to sneak a peek as you drive by. Brain mechanisms engage saying there might be something valuable for you to learn, since car accidents are rarely seen by most of us but involve an activity we do daily. That is why you feel compelled to rubberneck.

To understand how this works in the brain, we have intensively studied brain response that watching (compelling video) produces. We have used this to build a predictive model that explains why after watching the video, about half of viewers donate to a charity. We want to know why some people respond to a story while others do not, and how to create highly engaging stories.

We discovered that there are two key aspects to an effective story. First, it must capture and hold our attention. The second thing an effective story does is “transport” us into the characters’ world.”

Grabbing and maintaining attention and building empathy for your characters are thus two critically important jobs that any storyteller has to complete.  There is now strong neural evidence to support this.  Let’s look at how these could best be done to work with your reader’s brain. 

According to Zak, one good way of grabbing and maintaining the reader’s attention is to continually ratchet up the tension in the story.  Use James Bond as an example.  Imagine Bond fighting with a villain on top of a speeding train.  We don’t know what’s going to happen…things fly past our eyes in a blur…our heart rates elevate…our palms become sweaty…will he survive that tunnel coming around the turn?  Will Bond beat the bad guy?  Zak’s lab has shown that such physiological responses are consistent and can be predicted depending on whether certain responses are provoked.

Zak adds, “We attend to this story because we intuitively understand that we, too, may have to face difficult tasks and we need to learn how to develop our own deep resolve. In the brain, maintaining attention produces signs of arousal: the heart and breathing speed up, stress hormones are released, and our focus is high.

Once a story has sustained our attention long enough, we may begin to emotionally resonate with story’s characters. Narratologists call this “transportation,” and you experience this when your palms sweat as James Bond trades blows with a villain on top of (that) speeding train.

Transportation is an amazing neural feat. We watch a flickering image that we know is fictional, but evolutionarily old parts of our brain simulate the emotions we intuit James Bond must be feeling. And we begin to feel those emotions, too.”

Building empathy for your characters is the second key to telling a good story that will make your readers sweat and pant. 

Zak describes the neural basis for building empathy… “Emotional simulation is the foundation for empathy and is particularly powerful for social creatures like humans because it allows us to rapidly forecast if people around us are angry or kind, dangerous or safe, friend or foe.

Such a neural mechanism keeps us safe but also allows us to rapidly form relationships with a wider set of members of our species than any other animal does. The ability to quickly form relationships allows humans to engage in the kinds of large-scale cooperation that builds massive bridges and sends humans into space. By knowing someone’s story—where they came from, what they do, and who you might know in common—relationships with strangers are formed.

We have identified oxytocin as the neurochemical responsible for empathy and narrative transportation. My lab pioneered the behavioral study of oxytocin and has proven that when the brain synthesizes oxytocin, people are more trustworthy, generous, charitable, and compassionate. I have dubbed oxytocin the “moral molecule,” and others call it the love hormone. What we know is that oxytocin makes us more sensitive to social cues around us. In many situations, social cues motivate us to engage to help others, particularly if the other person seems to need our help.

When people watch (a story) in the lab—and they both maintain attention to the story and release oxytocin—nearly all of these individuals donate a portion of their earnings from the experiment. They do this even though they don’t have to.

This is surprising since this payment is to compensate them for an hour of their time and two needle sticks in their arms to obtain blood from which we measure chemical changes that come from their brains.”

Empathy and attention…two critical aspects that every story needs to have, even non-fictional ones. 

We’re neuro-biologically wired to love stories and we particularly love those stories that command our attention and involve characters we can empathize with.  Not exactly news to discerning writers and readers but it’s nice to know that current research in Science can support this age-old dictum of storytelling.

The next post to the Word Shed will come on December 17, 2018.   And watch out for that tunnel up ahead!

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

Post #147 December 3 2018

“Systematic Imagination”

One of the great joys of writing fiction is building and fleshing out an imaginary world.  In science fiction, this is usually called world-building.  In this post, I want to elaborate on this and explain how I use systematic imagination to create a believable fictional world for my readers.

In writing the seven novels in my series Tales of the Quantum Corps, I found it expedient, even necessary, to do whatever I had to for consistency and believability.  Toward that end, I wrote up a Backgrounder on what life would be like in the late 21^st and early 22^nd century.  I listed these areas to expand on:  General, Politics and Governance, Crime/Law Enforcement/Public Security, Business and Trade, Arts and Entertainment, Life and Culture, Science and Technology, Philosophy and Ethics, Education, Transportation, Food and Agriculture and Energy.  For each category, I wrote anywhere from a paragraph to several pages of background.  This structure forced me to take a methodical approach to building out my world.

Was this a lot of work?  Sure.  But it helped build a solid, consistent, accurate and believable foundation for all seven novels.  Doing this helped me avoid the syndrome where a character was blond in one story and bald with a moustache in another.  Any changes I made were deliberate and considered, fitting in (I hoped) to the overall world.

I did something of the same thing in The Farpool Stories and even made an Appendix out of my background which was included (a la Dune) at the conclusion of several of the stories.

How do I go about systematic imagination?  Like this:

1. Establish the setting.  Is it a new world?  Is it Earth two centuries from now?  Maybe it’s Earth of 1 million B.C.  Whatever it is, get the setting, the place, the locale firmly set in your mind.  Make a few notes. 
2. Work through the details.  This is the essence of systematic imagination.  With my Back-grounder, I had a structure into which I could pour all kinds of nuggets from my feverish imagination.  The structure kept me on track.  It pointed the way toward ideas and details I needed to pin down.  It even offered suggestions and ticklers to my brain about connections I hadn’t originally thought of, things I could use in the story itself.  Ask questions, lots of questions.  With molecular assembler technology widespread and cheap in Tales of the Quantum Corps, what would that mean for clothing and fashion, what people eat, how they fall in love?  It was during this process that I developed the idea for angels, para-human swarm entities that were so well configured they could pass for humans, even though they were really just clouds of bots.  That one idea suggested literally scores of other ideas, plot developments, conflicts and all kind of things that added to the stories.  Beyond asking questions, make maps and charts.  I often do that so I can refer to ship layouts, city plans, details of weapons or unusual gear and be consistent in what I write.
3. How to work all the fruits of your imagination into the story.  First of all, don’t ever do an info dump.  After thinking up all this whiz-bang stuff, there is an irresistible temptation to load up your story with long stretches of explanations and history, etc.  Don’t do it.  A little bit of detail goes a long way.  Let your readers use their own imaginations to fill in some of the details and do some of the work.  They’ll appreciate the story even more.  The best way to work details of setting and your imagination into the story is to know them so well that you absorb them and they come out naturally as you write, as you tell the story.  I know this sounds nebulous, but it you allow yourself to become so immersed in the background of the story and the characters, the details become second nature and will find their way into the story at just the right moment.  Try it. 
    
   Use or apply your imagination to create a fictional universe by using a systematic, planned approach.  This avoids waiting around for the muse or some kind of inspiration to strike you; who has time for that?   Use systematic imagination to build consistency, accuracy and believability into your stories.
    
   Your readers will notice and they’ll thank you for it.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on December 10.  See you then.
    
   Phil B.